Learn Thai Cooking in Koh Tao

Ingredient: Egg

Vegetarian and healthy Phad See Ew (ผัดซีอิ๊ว)

Our Phad See Ew recipe here reflects our strive for healthy cooking. This Chinese influenced noodle stir fry dish is traditionally done with copious amounts of oil and sugar, and rather few vegetables. The owners of street food stalls and restaurants soon realized, that Phad See Ew sells better like this. It tastes good but so does other junk food.
Doing some research I found this wonderful little video for preparing this dish which shows nicely what I mean:

Apart from the health aspect there is as well a little difficulty in replicating the shown way of preparing the dish. Watching the video I couldn’t help having an old song of Talking Heads in my head: Burning Down The House 🙂

We disagree that you need absolutely searing heat, Thai burners and the tin woks used in Thai street food stalls and restaurants to produce a tasty Phad See Ew. Our experience is rather, that for most westerners it is very difficult to get a good result with the traditionally used woks. These are very thin and light, and get hot very fast. If you don’t know exactly what you are doing, it’s a perfect recipe for disaster but not a very tasty dish.

We added a few more vegetables, reduced the use of cooking oil a lot and increased the cooking time just enough that someone who didn’t grow up using a wok can cope.

Thai Cooking Class – No Name Vegetable (โนเนมผัก)

Hardly found in any restaurant outside of Thailand, this cooking class is about a Thai snack, which is very popular with westerners, visiting the island destinations in the South of the country. The dish literally has no name in Thailand. It is a snack originating out of times of poverty, when people scrambled to make a living. This dish was made out of scraps. The name is probably not older than a few decades. It probably was named when American soldiers on leave from the Vietnam War were asking for the name of the dish. The Thai script in the title sounds “No Name Pak” with “Pak” meaning “vegetable”.
In our recipe for the cooking class is already mentioned in the ingredients “… and more vegetables of your choice” which can be taken face value – just experiment with any scraps you have at hand. They work as well with minced meats like pork and chicken and as a more sophisticated variety with prawns.
This snack is served with some tomatoes and lettuce. As a sauce you are usually given the same sweet chilly sauce which accompanies spring rolls when ordered in a restaurant. On our picture the sauce is a homemade sweet chilly sauce which preparation we will show you in another Thai Cooking Class recipe. If you like, you can prepare the curry paste yourself: Red Curry Paste